Wired: "VersionTracker, a popular software-download website, lists more than two dozen different hacks for the iPod."

Michael Sippey offers some fantastic ideas for ways Google can make money. The last one is surely in jest, but the first one hits the bull's eye, except I don't want it in the toolbar, I want a local Web app with Google branding and technology that integrates searching on the Web with searching on my local area network. I don't have $25K for a Google box, and that would be total overkill. I just want Google to index my email and other documents I have lying around on various local systems. It's so weird that it's faster and easier for me to find stuff on the Web than it is for me to find stuff locally. So much harder I usually don't even try.

1996 was a big year of innovation at UserLand. It started with a project with a thousand writers, that proved once and for all that the Web is not a productivity application, it's groupware.

Most of the code in my GUI website design tool was running in scriptland, in Frontier, which was then a shelved product after doing battle with Apple, and losing my shirt. Who knows whether it was wise or not, but in April 1996, I went back into Frontier and came up with what eventually would be called the Website Framework, which viewed a website as a hierarchy of content, attributes and scripts, and introduced the concept of rendering, and along with it, macros and the glossary.

All these concepts are still here today, and perhaps even more surprising, so is the implementation. The text you're reading now was rendered through the website framework that was developed in 1996. I think of this as the lizard brain of Frontier, Manila and Radio -- these were the first full steps towards web content management at UserLand, and while we only had a glimpse of what was to come, the work was good enough that we still use it today. Our detractors who say, unfairly, that we don't have an appreciation for continuity at UserLand should consider that website framework apps of 1996 still run in 2002, in the same way that today's web browsers can display sites that were built in 1996.

Anyway, when we were in the endgame for Radio 8 late last year, we had what I considered an inadequate implementation of Shortcuts, which is a browser-based interface on the glossary part of the lizard brain. I wanted to do something better than what we had, so we pulled the feature, and promised that we would swing back around to it after Radio 8 shipped.

I looked on Google, Teoma and Dictionary.Com and came up empty. So let me try to define what I mean by the term lizard brain. The human brain is a map of evolution. At the base of the brain are the most primitive functions, the unconscious automatic things like regulating breath, the heart, fight or flight, etc. As you go up and forward, the functions advance, and become more human, more conscious. The lizard brain is the part of the brain that we have in common with lizards, a very primitive form of life, compared to humans.

If you apply the same evolutionary principles to software, which is totally valid, you can see the layers as they came online. The Frontier 4 glossary was hardly the most primitive part of the system, for that you'd have to go deep into the kernel, and the low-level database functions, the script engine and the outliner, which were the first bits I programmed in 1988. So perhaps more analogously, the glossary of 1996 was really the bird brain of Radio 8. But you get the idea.

Matt Kineiko says I should look for reptile brain and sure enough, there are lots of hits for that. Thanks!

Jenny the Librarian spotted a white-on-orange XML icon in an unusual place. The Latest Headlines page at the Spartanburg Herald-Journal, in South Carolina, now advertises its RSS 0.91 feed and aims it straight at bloggers. Screen shot. How did it come to be? Andy Rhinehart, who's an editor there, reads Scripting News. The Spartanburg Herald-Journal is owned by the NY Times.

Song

Today's song: "She'll be coming round the mountain when she comes. She'll be coming round the mountain she'll be coming round the mountain she'll be coming round the mountain when she comes."